The gift of empathy

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Whispers of culpability. The endless, crushing weight of sorrow. A lifetime of pitying I-can’t-imagines.

These were the only “gifts” I could envision receiving in the wake of my daughter’s stillbirth.

I fully expected that her death would be a dark cloud hovering over our family for time eternal, dampening any future joy we may (unfathomably, at the time) manage to ever wrangle, forever rendering everything in our life less-than.

So when I stumbled across research that showed that siblings of babies who had died often displayed unusually high levels of empathy, I clung to that bit of consolation like a rock in a storm.

Losing my daughter had cracked my own heart open in a way I could never have anticipated, growing in me a visceral awareness of the suffering of our world that before I had somehow usually managed to keep at arm’s length. After a few months, the numbness of the shock wore off and suddenly the pain of others that had always surrounded me was revealed in exquisite, technicolor detail. It called to my own heartache, begging for kinship. And even though it hurt like hell to let it in, it was also cathartic: I was not alone any longer.

And so, having experienced firsthand the immense value of this one precious gift of grief, I read everything I could about how to cultivate it in any future children I might be lucky enough to bear. And then, once I’d finally stumbled out of the disorienting, all-consuming darkness of the early years and gotten my bearings, my own grief compelled me to — in whatever small way I could — give voice to this suffering which is too often silenced. With a small child on my hip, I wrote and organized, stood at podiums and made calls, whatever was in my power to shepherd other families through the nightmare of babyloss, and prevent still more from joining our ranks. Belatedly, I realized that I had unwittingly (and probably most importantly, in my children's eyes) been leading by example the whole time.

And sure enough, I have found the research to hold true. Some parents like to boast about their kid’s academic mastery or athletic prowess; for me, it is the epitome of pride that every single one of my son’s teachers has commented on his empathy. And my not-quite-two-year-old daughter seems to be following in her brother's footsteps — just the other night, she spent twenty inconsolable minutes during a thunderstorm contemplating the fate of the wildlife she realized would have to weather the storm outdoors. (Yes, that’s a full paragraph of #humblebrag, I’ll own it.)

So as I watch the world in chaos around me these past several months, it has become abundantly and heartbreakingly clear that empathy is in short, short supply on this planet.

Moreover, there is a clear divide between how the families I know who have been touched by loss are handling this, and everyone else.

Those who have been gripped by the cold hand of grief are facing each day with compassion and resilience. They are focusing on the little things, on the things they can control, doing their best to wring any joy they can out of these strange days in history, and giving themselves grace on those inevitable days when they simply cannot. No one is denying how hard things are — indeed, so much about this time is primed to exhume the demons huddled in the back of our traumatized brains, siphoning those most excruciating memories to the surface. But in fact, rather than focusing on their own struggles, most of the loss families I know instead seemed riddled with guilt over the hardships that they are witnessing amongst their neighbors.

As loss families, we know what it feels like to have someone you love denied that most basic right: the right to have a chance to wake up each day and take a breath and embark on a life. And whether from disease or disparity or despair, we don’t want anyone else to have to shoulder that burden.

So we close our mouths and open our hearts, and put on a brave face through whatever trials we are personally confronting, because we know there are literally hundreds of thousands out there right now who have it so, so much worse. And we know that it is only through sheer, stupid luck that it is not we who were singled out by fate, this time.

This is the gift of empathy.

What a world it would be if there were a little more of it to go around.